Book club + Sebastian Barry | The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/series/bookclub+sebastian-barry
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Guardian book club: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barryhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/18/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barry
John Mullan on The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry <br />Week four: readers' responses<p>Some critics have complained about the ending of Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, which involves what has been thought a hard-to-take coincidence. There may be readers of this column who have yet to reach the novel's final chapters, so I must be evasive about the precise plot twist that has provoked the arguments. One of the pleasures of the Guardian book club event, however, is that it presumes prior knowledge of the book, so readers and author were allowed to be quite explicit about the novel's climactic revelation. Barry admitted that, from the first, there had been dispute about the ending, and that even some of those readers who loved the book could, at best, only &quot;forgive the ending, in a Christian way&quot;.</p><p>The author entertained us with the other endings he could have provided, including a &quot;posh, get-out-of-it-smoothly ending&quot;, but he robustly defended his &quot;Dickensian&quot; d&eacute;nouement, citing Victorian fearlessness about the use of coincidence as a precedent. The Secret Scripture involves a mystery about the identity of one of its characters' parents. From Tom Jones to Bleak House, classic fiction is full of scenes in which characters discover their true parents. One close reader of the novel who spoke at the book club took a new angle on how a novelist might choose to solve such a mystery. He told us he worked in adoption and was used to managing these &quot;discoveries&quot; in real life. The author told us he could not imagine what it would be like in reality to be in such a scene. So he could not, in this instance, do the Dickensian thing and describe it.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/18/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barry">Continue reading...</a>Sebastian BarryFictionBooksCultureFri, 17 Apr 2009 23:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/18/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barryJohn Mullan2009-04-17T23:01:00ZGuardian book club: Sebastian Barryhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2009/apr/17/guardian-books-podcast
John Mullan talks to the author about his Costa prize-winning novel The Secret Scripture <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2009/apr/17/guardian-books-podcast">Continue reading...</a>Sebastian BarryBooksCultureCosta book awardsFri, 17 Apr 2009 10:30:53 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2009/apr/17/guardian-books-podcastTeri Pengilley/Teri PengilleySebastian Barry, winner of the Costa Book Awards 2009. Photograph: Teri Pengilley Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Teri PengilleyJohn Mullan2009-04-17T10:30:53ZGuardian book club: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barryhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/11/book-club-sebastian-barry
Week three: Sebastian Barry on the lost woman behind The Secret Scripture<p>In 1989 I was driving about Sligo with my mother. She not only loved all that country there, but her own story was deeply connected with it, a rather challenging childhood in Sligo but also an epic one in her memory, or one she had radically &quot;epicalised&quot;. My mother loved MR James before Henry, she loved mystery, secrets, churchyards, ancient wrongdoing, ghostliness, half-glimpsed things. As we passed a little ruined hut of a place, she said, in praise as it were of yet another family secret, &quot;That's where your woman was put&quot;. It is hard to explain what that phrase &quot;your woman&quot; can mean in Ireland. There's a lot packed into it. But in this instance she used the phrase because she literally didn't know the woman's name. She had been my great uncle's first wife, my mother told me, who had been the piano player in his band, and she had been placed in this hut in Strandhill and then sectioned sometime in the 30s or 40s, and was rumoured to have been very beautiful.</p><p>That was it, all that remained, not even a name surviving, because after that the woman's story had disappeared into the shadowy and vexatious halls of such an institution as the Sligo asylum of the day.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/11/book-club-sebastian-barry">Continue reading...</a>Sebastian BarryFictionBooksCultureFri, 10 Apr 2009 23:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/11/book-club-sebastian-barrySebastian Barry2009-04-10T23:01:00ZGuardian book club: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barryhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/04/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barry
John Mullan on The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry <br />Week two: Narrative structure<p>The Secret Scripture is a single story made of two narratives. Its title may point us to secrets from the past that will gradually be revealed, but it also describes the activity of its two narrators, who are both busy writing: the aged Roseanne McNulty, recording her memories in her private &quot;Testimony&quot;, and her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, scribbling in his &quot;Commonplace Book&quot;. Until near the end of the novel, they are writing in ignorance of each other's account, their texts interleaved to invite our curiosity. We have to put the story together from these two narratives.</p><p>Putting a story together is what Dr Grene is also trying to do. Reconstructing narrative is his profession. &quot;I feel mighty desirous to reach a conclusion about Roseanne.&quot; But he has his personal as well as his professional reasons. He pursues Roseanne's story out of his own grief after the death of his wife, as if he were trying to redeem the past. He has read the deposition of Fr Gaunt, the priest who condemned Roseanne for her supposed sexual misdemeanours, and recognises him as a &quot;stern-minded, and entirely unforgiving&quot; narrator. Fr Gaunt's narrative is &quot;a remarkable piece of work, clerical, thorough, and convincing&quot;, and yet it does not quite convince him.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/04/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barry">Continue reading...</a>Sebastian BarryFictionBooksCultureFri, 03 Apr 2009 23:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/04/the-secret-scripture-sebastian-barryJohn Mullin2009-04-03T23:01:00ZGuardian book club: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barryhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/the-secret-scripture
Week one: poetic prose<p>Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture has two narrators who share an unlikely gift. Roseanne McNulty, a 100-year-old patient in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where she has been an inmate for some five decades, writes a &quot;Testimony of Herself&quot;. This is a real, palpable document, kept hidden under a floorboard in her room. Meanwhile the psychiatrist Dr Grene, who is attempting to uncover her &quot;history&quot; (is she mad, or has she merely been abandoned?) writes a &quot;Commonplace Book&quot;. This too is an actual record, its fictional author reading back his own account to himself as he adds to it. The two characters are writing their stories and, in different styles, share a talent for strange and unprosaic sentences.</p><p>Both combine the precision of highly literate prose with the indecision of speech. Dr Grene has a habit of interrupting himself, as if impatient with the fictional convention that has been imposed on him. &quot;For the first time I have noticed the effrontery, I think that is the word, the effrontery of my profession.&quot; Finding the official documentation regarding Roseanne's case, he sees that it offers &quot;an account of the events that led up to her, I was going to say incarceration, but I mean of course her sectioning&quot;. Roseanne does something similar, sometimes interjecting in the midst of one of her own wilder statements. With slightly comic embarrassment, for example, she recalls her husband's sexual endearments and comments: &quot;Men are not really humans at all, no, I mean, they have different priorities.&quot; The correction is fondness, not prissiness.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/the-secret-scripture">Continue reading...</a>Sebastian BarryFictionBooksCultureSat, 28 Mar 2009 00:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/the-secret-scriptureJohn Mullan2009-03-28T00:01:00Z